Is new again…
SECDEF has announced there will be a medal for those who serve on the Mexican border…
Border medal, yes. New medal, no. We have proudly revived the 1918 “Mexican Border Service Medal” — same mold, same ribbon, same name, same service. We look forward to pinning the award on brave border soldiers soon…
X post HERE.
You know this is gonna upset a lot of folks…
Snerk…
IMHO, long overdue…
August 13, 2025: The current American president ordered audits organizations many had long suspected of diverting the money to recipients that would support anti American groups, lavish salaries for pro-government officials as well as foreign nation officials who responded to large bribes to see things the American way or just to oblige the recipients to one day return or carry out tasks requested by the current president.
Over 250 NGOs received most of this money and distributed according to what the current American president wanted. The recent U.S. government audits of most of these activities continued into 2025 because the NGOs and their government handlers believed they were immune to fraud claims because their activities served the wishes of whatever Presidential administration was in power. They were wrong and audits named names, and suggested cutting the money off and prosecuting those responsible. Those investigations and prosecutions continue.
The current government wants to destroy these practices. This does not surprise a lot of Americans who already knew that something like this was suspected because there had been rumors and stories in the news detailing some of this malpractice. These accusations were always ignored or denied.
Full article, HERE from the Strategy Page
This was published a week ago, but I’m just now catching up on my reading…
As anybody who has served in the military and been overseas knows, NGOs are the bane of our national policy.
Why, you may ask, do I say that if the are ‘doing the will of the administration’?
Well, because it long ago became what the NGOs ‘wanted’ to do and there was little to no check placed on them to ensure they were actually spending the money where it was supposed to go.
Everybody remembers the kerfuffle a few years ago over the salaries at the Red Cross, which is an NGO, but it’s even worse today. Reference HERE. And some of us have personal stories of the ARC trying to take over emergency relief in various places, including trying to ban volunteers from operating (Cajun Navy), providing free food (bbq, HEB providing water, etc.) and collecting money for EVERY emergency that happens, and they say they spend almost 90% of funds on “program services.” So no one really knows how much actually gets to the flood victims, etc.
Another huge NGO is now the United Nations. They spread food and other ‘relief’ around the world, but a lot of it ends up stolen by boots on the ground, much like the US Aid relief packages of food, flour, etc. you can see for sale in most third world souks…
And that’s not counting the relief workers that are raped, killed, etc. every year.
The original premise was ‘doing good’, but that has morphed to what the NGO leaders, e.g. ‘we’ think is good. And many of them are westerners, who have zero understanding of what is ‘good’ in a particular country…
So yes, I agree, audit the hell out of them. Charge them and send the guilty to prison! And take that capability and put in under control with audits, transparency, and knowledgeable people who are not out to feather their own nests…
Kicking the soapbox back in the corner and going to go find my BP meds.
First up is John Van Stry with the sixth book in his Wolfhounds series, End Game
As always, click on the cover for the Amazon link!
The blurb-
The fight has been a long one and a hard one with many unseen events along the way. The end however is here. The last battle of the war. The most important battle of the war. Soon they will leave for Cor Imperii, the capital of the empire. Soon they will launch a head-on attack against Speaker Phillip T Neill of the Democratic People’s Republic of Solaria. Soon Chase will do what he swore to do: Kill Neill, personally, tear down the DPRS, abolish the Secret Police, the Loyalty Officers, and re-establish the Empire of Solaria.
There’s just one last battle to fight to win the war.
Or is it? The last battle that is. Neill has his doomsday weapon, out there, somewhere, being developed in secret. It could kill billions, maybe more. Whole planets could be wiped out if it’s not found and stopped before it can be finished, before it can be used.
There’s also other players about. Other star kingdoms who have seen the inevitable decline that Neill and his government started when they lost access to the Tomb after killing off the prior emperor. In a hope to survive, or perhaps just seeing the state of the decaying Democratic People’s Republic, they’ve decided that some of those planets are ripe for the taking.
Which means that this battle may still have a few more rounds left in it before the Wolfhounds can, once and for all, return home.
Next is Pam Uphoff with the 18th novel in her Chronicles of the Fall series, Outer Tiers
The blurb-
Konstantin Aslanov is back!
And posted to an Outer Tier World with an orphaned guardian’s store–the official name of the oft rumored “Doomsday Cubes” so popular in cheesy spy movies.
He hadn’t counted on children in danger, buying a hundred race horses, or running head on into a corrupt colony government. But with newly acquired sidekicks, it’s full speed ahead to save an entire World as Plagues and Invasions hit the entirety of the Three Part Alliance!
Last but certainly not least, Josh Amos with his second book in the Orphan series, The Orphan’s Autumn
The blurb-
In “The Orphan, The Marine, and the Mastiff” Josh Amos introduced us to Brother, a broken Marine war fighter, and Mei Mei, his eight year old half sister as they struggle to overcome their respective traumas and form a family of choice.
In “The Orphan’s Autumn” we find Brother and Mei Mei are continuing to bond together as an odd couple, and are off to a shaky but determined start as they struggle to get on with making the best lives that they can for themselves. They are aided by the growing English Mastiff puppy Boudicca, because as Brother says “Little kids need dogs.”
Unfortunately for the odd couple siblings, dark forces are working to take Mei Mei away from Brother and Boudicca. Brother finds that all of this training and experience at war, are mostly inapplicable to his current challenge. To save his sister, Brother will have to find new ways to cope with his war injuries and his PTSD as he struggles to thwart the looming threat to his new family.
Highly recommend all three of these!!!
In case you didn’t or haven’t seen it, appears Walmart/Sams may have gotten some bad shrimp!
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday said it is actively investigating after a shipment of Walmart shrimp tested positive for a man-made radioactive material.
Officials collected multiple samples for radionuclide analysis, confirming Cs-137 in one sample of breaded shrimp. The shrimp supplier, PT. Bahari Makmur Sejati (aka BMS Foods), was added to the “red list,” meaning its products cannot be sold in the U.S. until the issue is resolved.
FDA officials said consumers should not eat or serve Great Value raw frozen shrimp from Walmart with lot codes: 8005540-1, 8005538-1 and 8005539-1.
Full article, HERE from Fox News.
This one is odd, in that normally it’s e coli or something like that. CS-137 has a half life of 30 years, and this is the warning from the CDC website…
Exposure to Cs-137 can increase the risk for cancer. Internal exposure to Cs-137, through ingestion or inhalation, allows the radioactive material to be distributed in the soft tissues, especally muscle tissue, exposing these tissues to the beta particles and gamma radiation increasing cancer risk.
Not particularly something one wants to eat…
Just sayin…
So, if you’ve bought Shrimp at Wally World lately, check those lot codes, and if what you bought in in one of those lots, dump it.
I ‘did not’ expect this… italics mine…
A funny thing happened on the way to once-Great Britain’s transformation into George Orwell’s dystopian Airstrip One: The renegade users of the anonymous 4chan forum got themselves legal representation and told British busybodies to sod off.
A little background.
4chan’s exploits are legendary, if not always savory.
Ever wanted to know how lefties came to believe that the perfectly innocent “OK” hand gesture is some kind of secret code for white supremacy?
That was 4chan.
Full article, HERE from PJ Media.
We all know 4chan is not a nice bunch of folks. As they say, they’ve ‘weaponized’ autism and taken it to the next level.
And people ‘really’ don’t want to piss them off, because they don’t get even, they get WAY ahead…
So this was an interesting way to take on the Brits. Now I’m sure that there are ‘alternate’ plans in place if the Brits get stupid on this, but kudos to 4chan for at least trying to do it the right way.
Hopefully, the Brits are smart enough to back off and leave well enough alone. If not… well…
To start the week…
It may take two or three seconds for the light to come on, but these are clever!
ARBITRATOR: A cook that leaves Arby’s to work at McDonalds
AVOIDABLE: What a bullfighter tries to do
BERNADETTE: The act of torching a mortgage
BURGLARIZE: What a crook sees with
CONTROL: A short, ugly inmate (get it??)
COUNTERFEITERS: Workers who put together kitchen cabinets
ECLIPSE: What an English barber does for a living
EYEDROPPER: A clumsy ophthalmologist
HEROES: What a guy in a boat does
LEFTBANK: What the robber did when his bag was full of money
MISTY: How golfers create divots
PARADOX: Two physicians
PARASITES: What you see from the top of the Eiffel Tower
PHARMACIST: A helper on the farm
POLARIZE: What penguins see with
PRIMATE: Removing your spouse from in front of the TV
RELIEF: What trees do in the spring
RUBBERNECK: What you do to relax your wife
SELFISH: What the owner of a seafood store does
SUDAFED: Brought litigation against a government official
Y’all have a good week!!!
Not!
The plant-based meat company has reported falling sales and dwindling cash.
The end was always inevitable for Beyond Meat, because being an innovator does not mean having a moat to protect your business. The pioneering company arguably created the category of plant-based meat that acts like actual meat.
That’s clever, but it’s not a defensible business. Once Beyond Meat BYND created the category, it was inevitable that the product would become commoditized.
Full article, HERE from The Street.
While it is ‘supposedly’ more healthy, it’s interesting to note that not a single comment was made about the ‘taste’ of Beyond Meat.
No one that ‘I’ have ever talked to said they actually liked it! The other thing I’ve heard, is that it’s greasy, by comparison.
FWIW, I personally have never tried any of it. I know I’m a dinosaur, but I like my ‘meat’ to be actual MEAT! Or chicken, or pork. Not some conglomeration of…something…
And that something is not patentable, so anybody can (and has) jumped into that pool. As the pool gets more crowded, IMHO, there isn’t enough of a customer base to support the additional players. That means somebody is gonna lose. In this case, it looks like Beyond Meat is the sacrificial lamb in this case, since they threw a LOT of $$$ at cornering the market early, rather than the long term projections (which they didn’t meet for growth either)… Too many rose colored glasses?
I don’t know.
But with it seems like many things flipping back and forth being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for us, who knows what the future holds???
What say you?
Finnish authorities have brought charges against the captain and two senior officers of a Russia-linked ship accused of deliberately damaging critical subsea cables in the Baltic Sea.
In a statement on Monday, Finland’s National Prosecution Authority said they had brought aggravated criminal mischief and aggravated interference with communications charges against the three senior officers aboard the Eagle S, a tanker registered in the Cook Islands. The three defendants were not identified publicly.
Full article, HERE from The Record.
And HERE is the statement from the Finnish prosecutors…
The sad part is that the US has NEVER charged any of the ‘third party’ ships that have attempted to cut the Transpac cable off LA, nor the ones that have cut the Hawaii cable more than once. All of the ships ‘say’ they didn’t know they were dragging anchor, but strangely, a number of them had their AIS go ‘suspiciously dead’ at just the right time…
Grrrr…
FWIW, I hope the Finns get a judgement, and this is the start of taking this shadow fleets to task for their actions, regardless of where in the world they occur…
In other news, I finally got some writing done on my book, granted it was only about 1000 words, but it was WORDS… 🙂
Whew… What a couple of weeks…
I made a promise to myself that I would ‘give back’ to the writer’s community by reading folks novels/stories as an alpha or beta reader. And I do that…
But, I didn’t expect to end up reading FOUR novels and a short story in the last couple of weeks!!!
I’m sorry I was a little longer than normal in my responses, but that was a lot of reading. I don’t do editing per se, but more of a continuity type read, e.g. MacGuffins, hanging plots, etc… and catching the obvious misspellings… Or at least I try. And I DON’T do grammar.
Not my thing… or punctuation… I just put commas at the end of my book and tell my editor to put ’em where she wants them,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Anyhoo, hopefully I’ll be back to working on ‘my’ novel today, and keep plugging on that for the next month or so to get it finished! I know I’m behind, and I apologize, but the back issues, and ‘life’ caught up with me.
First up is Rob Hampson with a short story collection, Tinker, Tailor, Bio, Spy
Click the cover for the Amazon link!
The blurb-
Seven Tales of Cells, Circuits, and Cyborgs
From battlefield surgeons to posthuman colonists, from neural firewalls to anti-augmentation fanatics—these stories explore the line between body and machine, memory and manipulation. A line where humanity must embrace the future… or lose it.
From national bestselling author Robert E. Hampson comes Journeys Beyond the Known—a series of science fiction and science fantasy collections that explore the human condition through the lens of biotechnology, space exploration, and strange futures.
The journey begins at the edge of knowledge… and ends where only story can take us.
Next up is Cedar Sanderson with a new tale, Following Trouble- A Tale of Underhill
The blurb-
Next is Holly Chism with a new offering, Soul Inheritance
The blurb-
Last but not least, Raconteur Press has a new anthology out, Alien Family Traditions
The blurb-
Highly recommend all of them, each is different, but very good!!!